


Sehnsucht

by onewithroses



Category: Captain America (2011), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Over Wrought, Superhusbands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-15
Updated: 2012-07-15
Packaged: 2017-11-10 00:40:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/460333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onewithroses/pseuds/onewithroses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Peggy were star crossed--but that doesn't mean they can't meet again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sehnsucht

**Author's Note:**

> [Sehnsucht: Meaning of the title for those interested](http://other-wordly.tumblr.com/post/25960987469/other-wordly-pronunciation-zen-zukt)
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> Loosely based on [this](http://sarahdoesfandom.tumblr.com/post/27235239876/barackfuckingobama-cancerously) headcannon.

In the long afternoons, after her nap and before her a dinner of processed food that is little enough to interest anyone, what is left of Peggy Carter combs the hallways. Her legs are twisted pencils and her arms, which had once been strong enough to slap a man down for insults, can no longer bare her weight so, she creeps like the rest of the inmates. She palms the wall of the nursing home: one hand over another, and another, and another another all across the yellow paisley wallpaper. It's conquered inch by inch with gritted teeth and determination because what else has she to do here? The others -- her neighbors, her fellow forgotten -- do it, too. She watches them pass on adjacent halls--their eyes vacant, disinterested, working like machines rather than people and she grabs for herself at the sight, feels it slip through her fingers.

Maybe she's the same as them. Maybe she is a shell with empty eyes, too, grabbing at better days in her memory. Some days she wakes and whole days seem to have disappeared like so many shell casings. Some days she wonders if she isn't already dead--or if the past sixty-odd years haven't all been a dream. If it wasn't for the photographs of smiling children--her own, her grandchildren, the children of the men she was closest to in the army, black and white photos of soldier boys long gone--she would think _it must be_.

It must be.

"Peggy, you have a visitor." A woman in scrubs leans beside her wheelchair and Peggy Carter--no, Mills. It's been Mills for an eternity now--nods once. She has been Peggy Mills longer than she ever was Peggy Carter.

"Of course, dear." It's not cold enough for Christmas and Easter--they never come for Easter. It can't be the fourth already. She always wanted visitors on the fourth.

In a blink, she's back in her room but can't remember the whoosh of the wheels on the brown carpet. There is, in fact, a man there. He's dressed in slacks and a jacket -- stiff looking, military -- and Peggy is not a stupid woman, even now with her mind and body betraying her. Military can only be trouble now.

Her limbs might be atrophied. Her mind might fize in and out in spurts. She might shake and lay in bed with her breath in her ear thinking-- _tonight, tonight_ \--but she is a survivor and she is always prepared to go down with a fight.

Inside her drawstring pants -- horrible things, she feels like an infant dressed in those but the laundry keeps sending her slacks to other women -- she keeps a pearl handled hat pin. It's four inches long and thick. A man might call it an ice pick, but they never had to know the use of a good hat pin.

She palms it, willing and waiting.

"Peggy." The voice is hushed, heavy. She can't see his face as he turns. The afternoon sunlight is too bright from the window. " _Peggy_."

No young man has said her name like that in decades. The last man to do so was her husband, and he's been dead nearly twenty years. She tightens her fist and he _folds_ , half into her useless knees. In an instant, she is a mother again.

"What's the matter?" She loosens the hold on the hat pin and it rolls into the seam of her seat while her fingers to go the young man's blond hair. Blond. Young. He might as well be a baby--he is hardly old enough to know anything and here he is so upset. She purses her lips--was this Bobby's boy? Susans? Who would seek her out _here_ after what felt like eons.

"I missed our date." And it's a wrench for both of them, one Peggy can scarcely believe. It would be easier to think this a cruel joke but at the same time, the same terrible time, it all seems so _right_ \--because she always wanted this to be right, to be real. It doesn't take long for her want to make her disregard all possible ‘nos'.

"Steve?" Peggy is old now, and has been married. She doesn't see herself as someone to cry over. This body of hers is something she wishes she could give away, let people remember her when she was--perhaps not young but still strong enough to carry herself. The face that turns up to her is young and fresh and full of tears like so many family members she's soothed in the past few decades. This face, his face, is not one from this world and for a second Peggy smiles--a row of well won wrinkles. "Steve."

She cups his face in her hands and drinks in it--perhaps this is one last kindness before death. Maybe it is real. Perhaps its a fantasy that she has fallen to while waiting as a statue for mashed peas and sour juice. She can't be sure which is the reality and she doesn't want to be.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Peggy imagines he expected this to go very differently. She expects that he is sorry for more than what he appears to be apologizing for. She presses a thumb over his lips--a brush of paper thin skin.

"Make it up to me, then, if you're going to visit." Maybe she'll be found dancing by herself by the nurse. Stranger things have happened. Once she ended up on the other side of the building jimmying a lock at four am. She couldn't remember why she had been doing that--but it had been _important_.

Peggy banishes the thoughts from her mind and gestures to the old record player she still keeps. "Vera Lynn, _We'll Meet Again_. You do still remember how to play a record, don't you?"

He stands and fiddles with the machine. It's from 1960--seventeen years after he disappeared--but he figures it out anyway and she smiles. She doesn't know if she could explain it. Not from here.

"Will you dance with me?" He is every bit the gentleman and she is every bit the crone. She dreamed about this for years. This dance. His smile. Her red lipstick. Instead of living the dream, she nods and has to reach up her arms for an assist out of her chair. Instead of a nice dress and lipstick she is wearing little more than baby blue sleep clothes--her silver hair askew and unpermed.

The hat pin falls to the floor as she rises and Steve looks at it, looks at her, and she shrugs with another smile that has wizened with age. "A girl has to protect herself--even here."

The song isn't romantic, not exactly, but it's fitting and slow so she can lean the brunt of her slight weight against Steve -- Steve, it's Steve, it really is -- without it being as obvious as it may otherwise be. Her slippers barely touch the ground and the song ends and another begins. These are the songs she wanted to dance to with him. _We'll meet again_ and _A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square_ and they fill her with longing because--maybe its not real and this is all a dream.

  
Later, after they've had their fill of dancing, Peggy falls asleep to the sound of Steve's voice and with the warmth of his hand in hers. There's a dampness in her eyes that Steve wishes wasn't and a silence in the building he finds cold, sterile. There should be family here--that's what people use to do. They use to take care of their grandparents instead of send them away.

But here Peggy is. Old. Alone.

He'd steal her away if he knew what to do but he doesn't. He can barely operate a microwave sometimes--much less the bits of equipment he sees dot the rooms here.

He has never felt so useless.

Tony knocks on the door and leans in. "Come on, Cap." It's bordering on obnoxious, but that's almost what he needs now--something to draw his mind away from the body on the bed that's lived a lifetime he missed. "Time to go. You can visit again."

"Yeah." Steve nods. He leaves. "Yeah."

Tony makes arrangements--or he has Pepper do it. Brighter walls, one on one care. Giving a little old lady the works because it's better for both her and Steve. He could spend his money worse ways.


End file.
